Floods, storms, extreme weathers, forest fires, earthquakes and technical disasters often affect wide areas of Europe. To optimize Europe-wide preparedness and to improve disaster relief actions the European Union is funding the project "Driving Innovation in Crisis Management for European Resilience" (DRIVER) under its Seventh Framework Programme for Research (FP7).
The EU project DRIVER will apply technologies for crisis management in a common Europe-wide joint demonstration.
DRIVER started in May 2014 with a kick-off meeting in Madrid and about 100 experts from 37 European project partners coming from 15 countries. With a budget of more than 46 million euro DRIVER is the world's largest publicly funded demonstration project in the field of crisis management and resilience.
Within DRIVER, the DLR techniques of automated unmanned aircraft systems are supplemented by the VABENE++ system and tools in order to provide a quick and safe overview of the disaster area. Data of the current traffic situation and drivable routes are important for emergency personnel in order to coordinate disaster logistics. Moreover different scenarios will be evaluated with the integrated traffic simulation as part of the decision support system.
The project highlight will be Europe-wide final demonstrations of the integrated systems for crisis management support in different large-scale disaster scenarios. DLR will provide a remote airborne system and the VABENE++ system and tools to these exercises.
